Like it or not, email captures our attention! Without a strategy for mastering and managing your email, its distracting and addictive nature will slice your hours into unusable time confetti. As knowledge workers, we now (on average) spend a massive 40% of our day inefficiently multitasking; we check email and IM every 6 minutes and spend just 2.8 hours a day on productive tasks (RescueTime, Work Life Balance Study).
When you spend large portions of your day in a state of fragmented attention – taking a quick glance at your inbox, another quick glance at messages on your phone etc., you end up reducing your capacity to concentrate. And so the cycle worsens; with poor attentional intelligence, you’ll spend more time jumping from task to task, resulting in things taking longer and feeling harder than they need to and increasing your stress and frustration.
You’ve probably heard about Inbox Zero, but have you heard of Inbox Infinity? Is Inbox Zero still relevant? Is it even possible?